2019 in Digital Marketing
Step One
Appraise the Ranking Potential of the Website. (Onsite SEO)
Ideally this is done during website build so that changes/suggestions can be implemented. However most remedial work can be carried out with the right access to an existing website. Typically this process takes between a few hours for a small website (under 20 pages) to several days for a large website with many products and perhaps hundreds of pages.
While it is possible to offer digital marketing solutions that do not have a business website at their core, that is a more intricate topic for another time. We are going to assume that your services are required to act on an existing website or building a new website is part of your remit.
Among the issues addressed with this appraisal should;
- Server speed. How fast does a page load? Slow and inconsistent loading is a contra indicator of a good SEO position
- HTML and CSS consistency and accuracy. Is the site HTML compliant? Is it responsive? Sites that break rules may not view correctly in certain browsers, they may crash browsers and offer a sub optimal user experience.
- Tags and META data. How does the site present itself to search engine crawlers? What existing keywords are in the META data? Do all images have Alt tags? Is there any duplication or over-run of meta-data.
- Appraisal of written content. How does the written text on each viable landing page support the sites main commercial aims? Does the text make it clear to users and search engines what the purpose of the site is. IS there a flow thought the site leading to pages where the desired interaction takes place (i.e. buying a product, filling in a form, making contact or other commercially valuable activities)? (See Step Two below)
- Navigation and internal linking. Would a visitor to the site arriving on any page know how to get where they wanted to go? Is navigation clear? This is a product of the navigation bars at the top or borders of the site as well as internal links in the content
- Social media presence. Does the site have mentions on popular social media platforms? Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter. While not essential to SEO this gives an indication of the activity the site currently generates in the wider internet market. A well populated Facebook page with evidence of user engagement is a good indicator of brand awareness. An unused Facebook page that has not been updated for many weeks or months sends a message to users that the site owners are absent.
- Competition analysis. Perhaps most importantly. Who are the online competition for this site? How do they differ from the “bricks and mortar” competition? What keywords are commercially valuable and what sites currently rank for them. How do they achieve their rankings and what methods should be used to compete successfully against them? (See Step Three below)
Step Two
Identify Appropriate Commercial Keywords
Done in conjunction with part one (above). Typically takes less than half a day.
Google, Bing and Yahoo are, in most aspects of understanding a website’s commercial purpose “dumb”. Their AI will not understand what keywords your site should rank for unless it is made explicitly clear in the content of the site
This is where keywords come in.
There are likely keywords associated with the products and services your site offers. For example, a site making widgets might naturally want to rank for the word “widgets”. It might also want to rank for terms such as “Blue Widgets” “Widgets for sale” “Affordable widgets” “Widgets UK” “Local widget manufacturer” and many other variations.
It is often the case that a more detailed term is commercially much more value.
For instance, “widgets” could apply to many products of different types. There is no commercial imperative in the term. A Google user may well have no intention to buy. They might be doing academic research, they may be a competitor, perhaps looking for specifications for products they already own.
However, the term “Widgets in Birmingham” Implies a relatively strong commercial imperative. Although the numbers of people searching for this term will be substantially lower that those searching for “widgets” alone
Step Three
Competition Analysis
It’s hard to stress enough how important knowing the online competition is, and having a good understanding of where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Over years of analysing sites for clients and competitors we have come to understand that typically business owners are largely unaware of how their online competition differs from their bricks and mortar competition.
Commercial websites that focus on one or two fields and activities might require a day’s work to accurately assess competition and formulate a plan to beat them. Large websites that offer multiple services or products can scale in this regard to many days, weeks or even months.
Each keyword group needs to be assessed and a list of those sites currently ranking on page one of Google for each group.
We typically split the sites into;
Direct competition – A website that represents a business offering the same products or services as the client.
Indirect Competition – A website that represents a commercial business that differs in some fundamental way from the client’s site yet competes for the same keywords. Example the term “Load balancing” is commercially valuable and is used in engineering, financial and electrical businesses among other sectors. Each sector having a subtly different meaning for the term and offering markedly different products or services related to the term.
Academic – None commercial websites and online reports. This suggests that this keyword has been identified by Google as academic. This is where larger more explanatory content is required. It is possible to be a commercial offering among academic listings, the effort required is substantially greater and the initial content requirement is often far more.
None commercial / incidental – From time to time a website will rank for a term of phrase that seems to have little commercial or academic purpose. Social media sites are a good example of this.
Micro blogging sites such as Redditt or Stumbleupon. Sometimes Facebook pages or individual Twitter posts can be present on page one of Google alongside Youtube videos
Step Four
Website Content Analysis – Content Overhaul
New content, copywriting. Ensuring the new content meets the criteria of both users and search engines. Typically a full web page of between 500 and 1000 words of researched and SEO optimised content designed to give the website a good chance of ranking for the appropriate keywords the content is about (once supported with link building) would take between half a day to a day each.
Much of a site’s strength in terms of visitor retention, SEO potential and conversion to sale is down the site’s content. Ideally it is correctly formatted, loads promptly, is grammatically and syntactically correct and “under the hood” complies with certain rules such as HTML conformance, the correct use of META data such as image Alt tags.
In terms of SEO and relevance content relates to the support of one or more keywords or key phrases that are commercially important to the site. In some instances, the initial appraisal will have picked up a number of phrases from the sites existing metadata. This means that the website designer added these to the meta data in the root domains HTML header. Often it is fair to assume that the website owner specified these terms as important. But best is to ask the website/nosiness owner directly what keywords are commercially important for them and then use a tool such as Google keyword planner to see the potential traffic, competition and commerciality of those words as well as look at alternatives and long tail additional words and phrases.
Each page can have its own set of targeted keywords. However, the number of keywords should be limited to no more than 3-5 per page and definitely should be strongly related to one another.
If you wish to optimize a page for more than 5 words or phrases it is usually better to split the ideas that you are trying to convey into 2 or more pages and create optimized content for each new page based on the subset of terms selected.
There are important decisions to be made at this point. It is rare that every page on a website needs to be analysed for content. In practice the pages that you expect visitors to land on first – so called “landing pages” are the most important. These pages ideally would rank well in search engines, provide valuable information to your visitors, and then encourage these visitors to taker the next steps towards your site’s primary goals; such as make ins a sale, filling in a contact form or downloading a brochure.
A list of all the URL’s discovered in the initial scan will be displayed. Choose those that are important as landing pages. Ideally batch them with a maximum of 4 or 5 pages per run. Most local business sites will not have more than 3 or 4 pages that act as landing pages though this will depend on the number of products or services offered.
Step 5
Ongoing SEO. Content creation, content broadcasting and link building
Used in conjunction with ongoing content build. Link building is a long-term effort. Between half a day to a day per month for most business websites focussed on specific products or services.
Inbound links are still a vital factor in ranking a website for commercial terms.
Links on third party websites that lead visitors to the client site still represent perhaps 40% of SEO efficiency.
Google, Yahoo and Bing are strongly against aggressive link building techniques (link spamming) however a content broadcasting approach allied to an effective content broadcasting system works in almost all cases. The creation of fresh content to be posted on the website is the first stage. This content is then broadcast to other networks, using macro levels of paid promotion if required. The aim being to ensure the content is seen by as many people relevant to it as possible. The long term goal is that a percentage of these with find the content useful, engaging or entertaining and link to it.
This is largely a numbers game. It is normally the case that one link per 200 engaged users (0.5% link rate) is seen as an excellent result and frequently the link rate is closer to 0.2%. An effective content broadcasting network is therefore essential to ensure maximum visibility